“We tried that, duckling, as I’ve told you,” said her teacher, but quite kindly. He had removed his kit of rolling papers and pouch of evil-looking innards, and had begun to roll a cigarette. “The layer of dead matter and Heralds is two thousand kilometres thick.”

“Send a Lyctor to penetrate the layer, plant the bomb close up. I’ll do it, if courage fails in the hearts of my elders.”

Ortus said, “Tried that,” and Mercy said, “Cytherea was mad for weeks. And I do not mean mad cross, I mean mad insane. She didn’t even touch on the surface.”

“It’s not that getting rid of the corpus wouldn’t be useful,” said the Emperor. “It would be. When Cyrus drew the corpus into a black hole, Ulysses said that it was the simplest thing in the world to dispose of the brain, that it fell into a dormant state, and he could bring it down to a stoma singlehanded … but that cost us Cyrus. And Cassiopeia drove the body into the River alongside its own brain, but only Cassy could have ever done that … or Augustine.”

It was halfway to a question. Augustine said, “I’m not Cassy, John. It’s all theoretical to me.”

And God said, “I hope it stays theoretical. Anyway, the damn thing hardly seemed to care. Put the Heralds aside, Ianthe. Leave them to your sword-hand.”

You said, “And how to defeat the Beast? What does it look like? How will it attack us? What must we expect?”

Mercymorn took her fat-tipped marker and scribbled on the plex, placing her new object squarely in the epirhoic layer. “This is the Beast,” she said.

Augustine said, “That’s a muffin.”

“I see a cloud, but with a face,” said Ianthe. “If you take that main squiggle for an eye.”

You said, “I thought it was a flower,” and God said, “No, yes, I agree, there’s something—florescent about it.”

And Ortus said, “Thought it was a snake in a bush.”

“I hate you all,” said Mercymorn passionately. “I have hated you for millennia … except you, my lord.”

“Thanks,” said God.

“I merely want to put you in a jail,” said his Lyctor, now meditative, “and fill up the jail with acid once for every time you made a frivolous remark, or ate peanuts in a Cohort Admiralty meeting, or said, ‘What would I know, I’m only God.’ Then at the end of a thousand years, you would say, ‘Mercy, I have learned not to do any of these things, because I hated the acid you put on me.’ And I would say, ‘That is why I did it, Lord. I did it for you, and for your empire.’ I often think about this,” she finished.

The Emperor of the Nine Houses said, “I ate peanuts, discreetly, the once.”

You said, “Let us continue on the assumption that the diagram is the Beast.”